All the Pretty Horses- - - - Long before I read All the Pretty Horses, I had read B.R. Myers's essay savaging Cormac McCarthy and other contemporary literary darlings for their pretentious artificial prose. While inside the vaulting of the ribs between his knees the darkly meated heart pumped of who's will and the blood pulsed and the bowels shifted in their massive blue convolutions of who's will and the stout thighbones and knee and cannon and the tendons like flaxen hawsers that drew and flexed and drew and flexed at their articulations of who's will all sheathed and muffled in the flesh and the hooves that stove wells in the morning groundmist and the head turning side to side and the great slavering keyboard of his teeth and the hot globes of his eyes where the world burned. The criticism of All the Pretty Horses is both fair and unfair. It's true that this sentence and others cited by Myers seem to aim for evocative language at the expense of making any sense. (And shouldn't it be whose will? I think so, but it doesn't make much sense that way either.) But I don't think these sentences are representative of the book as a whole, which has a decent plot and is not just a mass of incomprehensible poetic babbling about horses. McCarthy does eschew certain typographical conventions: he doesn't use quotation marks; he often omits apostrophes; he doesn't use many commas; he likes to form compound words like "cattlebuyer" or "diningroom" without space or hyphen; and he does not capitalize some words like "english" and "french." I don't really know what the point of this is. Anything for a distinctive style? But I enjoyed the book. I would read something else by McCarthy. |